Time for more movie reviews! We’re dipping into video nasty territory again – content warnings for rape and abuse themes apply – as I take in three Wes Craven movies. There’s his 1972 debut feature which ended up on Section 1 of the infamous “video nasty” list (comprising movies which were prosecuted for obscenity), his second effort from 1977 which was a so-called “Section 3” video nasty (not prosecutable for obscenity but prone to be confiscated), and a 1991 effort which wasn’t touched because it came out after the moral panic had largely run its course.
Each of these movies was written and directed by Craven, and each of them plays on a recurring theme of his – that of characters hailing from different subsets of American culture ending up in a life-and-death conflict, a culture clash within US society playing out in starkly violent terms. Eventually, Craven would take this theme and hone it to a fine satirical point, but his first go-around on the topic was somewhat crude, and legendarily brutal with it…
The Last House On the Left
Serial killer and rapist Krug Stillo (David A. Hess), his heroin-addicted son and accomplice Junior (Marc Sheffler), sexual abuser and murderer Fred “Weasel” Podowski (Fred Lincoln), and the sadistically cruel and frighteningly erratic Sadie (Jeramie Rain) are a gang of fugitives – Krug and Weasel having escaped from jail with the help of the others. As they hole up in an apartment in the city, the tension between wanting to get to somewhere a bit less busy where they’re less likely to be recognised and wanting to indulge their nasty habits increases.
Meanwhile, Mari (Sandra Peabody) and Phyllis (Lucy Grantham) are two teens from a rural area who head out one night to catch a concert in the big city. When they make the mistake of approaching Junior to try and buy marijuana, he ends up luring them to the apartment, which begins a hideous nightmare of gang rape, torture, and violence which will ultimately leave both Mari and Phyllis dead. By the end of the ordeal, the gang are out in the countryside; when their car breaks down, they swing by the home of Dr. John Collingwood (Richard Towers, billed as Gaylord St. James) and his wife Estelle (Eleanor Shaw, billed as Cynthia Carr), passing themselves of as travelling salespeople.
There’s just one problem: the Collingwoods are Mari’s parents. And when they see through the malefactors’ ruse and realise what they have done, they go to extreme lengths to take a brutal revenge. Krug, Junior, Sadie, and the Weasel will rue the day they visited The Last House On the Left…
The story so far: after the Timewyrm arc established the Virgin New Adventures and the Cat’s Cradle arc saw them leaning into their more experimental side, the run of novels from Nightshade to Deceit saw Ace leave the TARDIS, 26th Century archaeologist Bernice “Benny” Summerfield joining, and Ace coming back again after spending some time in the 26th Century becoming a catsuited warrior badass. The next tranche of novels would explore the “new normal”, in which in a departure from his televised appearances the Seventh Doctor would be accompanied by two companions at once. (OK, sure, there was Dragonfire which had Mel and Ace in it, but Ace doesn’t officially sign on as a companion there until Mel says “I’m interested in Glitz so I’m calling it quits.”) This would be an important test of the concept; stories like The Highest Science had shown that Bernice could work very well as a solo companion, but now the chemistry between the Doctor, Benny, and new-Ace must be tested. Let’s see how that goes…
Lucifer Rising by Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore
The first journey of the Doctor-Benny-Ace trifecta takes them to the gas giant Lucifer and its moons, Moloch and Belial. It’s the 2150s, and Earth Central has set up a research programme – Project Eden – with the goal of examining the mysteries of this system, such as the space elevator connecting the two moons (in a manner which makes a nonsense of everything physics tells us about how gravitational orbits work, the hollow world within Moloch full of vegetation, the weird artifacts concealed in Belial, and the utterly strange aliens, dubbed the Angels, that live in the atmosphere of the gas giant itself. The ultimate goal is to establish communication with the Angels in order to gain their co-operation in extracting rare materials from the core of the gas giant – materials which could be useful to Earth’s ever-growing requirements for energy.
In her own time, Benny knows this as an archaeological oddity; records showed that some fruitful research had happened here, only for the whole thing to shut down under mysterious circumstances. The Doctor’s fascinated too, and Ace seems to be taking an interest as well, despite her grumpier attitude and her deeper commitment to violence. Perhaps Ace’s skills will be of use – for within a few weeks of the TARDIS crew ingratiating their way into Project Eden, Paula Engado dies. Paula, daughter of Project Coordinator Miles Engado, ended up suffering a malfunction in her starsuit – an advanced spacesuit with significant self-propulsion capabilities – and fell into Lucifer’s atmosphere, the extreme pressure rupturing her starsuit and killing her. Adjudicator Bishop has arrived to investigate the case, and everyone is a suspect – including the Doctor.
Bishop is right to be suspicious. The ultimate value of Project Eden, from Earth’s perspective, are those sweet sweet anomalous materials in the gas giants, not the research – and that means powerful interests are paying attention to Project Eden. That includes IMC – the dodgy mining corporation from Colony In Space – who’ll stop at nothing to take control of things. With the Project staff on edge and off their game thanks to the shock of Paula’s death, the IMC’s spy could end up with a fairly free hand. It’s a good thing that the Doctor, Benny, and Ace are all carefully keeping an eye on things… or it would be, if there wasn’t a dangerous, manipulative chess game being played with time travel here. And this time, it’s not the Doctor who’s playing. For back in the 2500s, Ace made her own deal with IMC…
Professional translator Alice Campos (Florinda Bolkan), who has been providing real-time translation for an academic conference on astronautics, is haunted by a disturbing dream – a garbled memory of a cheesy old 1950s sci-fi movie she saw in her youth but didn’t catch the end of, Footprints On the Moon, in which the mysterious Professor Blackmann (Klaus Kinski) arranges for astronauts to be abandoned unconscious on the surface of the Moon, in order to observe their reactions when they wake up to see the lunar module flying away without them. Alice wakes up Thursday morning and belatedly discovers that she can’t remember anything since Monday afternoon, when she was called in unexpectedly to fill in someone else’s translation shift at the conference.
A ripped-up, blank postcard she finds among her possessions advertises the Hotel Garma, on the island of Garma; with her being suspended on her job pending a disciplinary decision, due to her employers not buying the amnesia line, Alice has ample time to investigate. She has no recollection of being on Garma before – but plenty of people recognise her, not as Alice but as “Nicole”. Has Alice/Nicole been the victim of some sort of psychological fugue state? If so, what prompted it? And either way, what happened during her bout of missing time? To discover that, she’ll need to retrace her steps, pick up her trail, and follow her Footprints…
Footprints – AKA Footprints On the Moon, AKA Primal Impulse, AKA Le Orme, is one of the few giallos directed by Luigi Bazzoni, and would be his last theatrical release. Co-written by Bazzoni and Mario Fenelli, it is an (apparently quite loose) adaptation of Las Huellas, a novel by Fenelli. It’s recently enjoyed a rerelease on Blu-Ray via Shameless, which offers it in two versions – the US cut and an an “Integral Cut” restoring the full running time, albeit with some scenes only in Italian with English subtitles because an English dub for them either no longer exists or was never made. Emerging in 1975, Footprints is a product of the classier, artier side of the genre; one would be tempted to draw comparisons with Dario Argento, particularly when it came to the use of colour, except actually I’d say the Argento this reminds me most of is not any of his 1970s gialli but Tenebrae – it has a similarly cold, isolated aesthetic to it, which perhaps is meant to achieve a similar effect in terms of underlining the alienation of the main character.
Not, I hasten to add, that Footprints is remotely as violent or gruesome as Tenebrae – in fact, there’s vastly less in the way of direct violence here than is typical for the genre, and it’s also vastly less horny than the vast majority of its peers. The Shameless Blu-Ray has a 12 certificate, which is astonishingly low for a giallo. It isn’t without thrills – matters escalate to murder eventually, but it takes a good while to get there – but it’s much more interested in the “slowly deepening mystery” side of the genre than it is the cheaper thrills. This feels like the right call for the subject matter. There’s a melancholic air over the entire thing – a sort of aching sadness, where regular bouts of eroticism would seem incongruous.
The production was shot in a few weeks in 1974, split between Rome and Turkey, which perhaps helps give the sense of the fictional island of Garma as being a sort of no-place, with architectural flourishes that are here reminiscent of one culture, there reminiscent of another – we can think of it not as Rome, not Istanbul, not even Byzantium, but a fragment of long-lost Trebizond, a place where things can be lost and forgotten. If Alice is a citizen of the world – hailing from Portugal, working in Italy, translating a swathe of other languages – then Nicole must then be a citizen of Garma, a personality created during her jaunt that was only exposed on that island.
Alice’s investigation, then, is as much about inferring a psychological profile of Nicole as it is retracing her steps. Nicoletta Elmi has a striking role as Paola, a child who recognises Alice/Nicole and seems to want to be friendly, but her parents strongly disapprove of Nicole/Alice and try to keep Paola away from her. In some moments, it seems like Paola was hurt by Nicole somehow; in others, Alice’s insistent demands for answers seem to put her on the verge of hurting Paola – again? There’s been plenty of movies in which protagonists become aware of an inner, deeper darkness to themselves, but a lot of the time that dark side is actually just kind of fun and sexy; here Alice’s other side seems to be genuinely dangerous, which heightens the horror of her predicament.
(Elmi had a bit of a gala year in 1975 – as well as being an enigmatic kid here, she had a role in Deep Red as an enigmatic kid there.)
The visuals on the new Blu-Ray are a great improvement over the last version of Footprints I saw, really teasing out aspects that prior versions glossed over a little. There’s some day-for-night scenes shot with a heavy blue tint which gives them this striking look; other shots are overwhelmed with whites and greys (like Alice lounging in her cream-coloured clothes on her pale couch in her blank apartment), bringing to mind the monochromatic wasteland of the Moon (which itself prefigures the dusty otherworld in Fulci’s The Beyond). Something which is also emphasised is how the Professor Blackmann segments from Alice’s visions are shot in stark black and white with lots of artifacts, like the film-within-a-film is some tired-out B-movie – an aspect which is easier to perceive with the visual improvements to the rest of the movie.
Obviously, with a concept like this the resolution requires a deep dive into Alice/Nicole’s psychological state, which is where a lot of movies of this vintage end up fumbling things, but in this instance I can buy it. The depressing speech at the astronautics convention, alluding to a projected mass biosphere die-off on Earth due to pollution, weaves in a climate anxiety theme early on, and between this and the commented-on dissatisfaction that Alice has in her job it is believable that some sort of psychological episode could have been triggered by all that. It’s equally believable that, once the fugue kicked off, Alice/Nicole would seek refuge in a place and with a person she has little to no conscious memory of, but offers a side of life she has neglected, and which perhaps she feels this deep-seated need to explore.
The final twist reveals that the thing that Alice/Nicole has to fear most is the ailment which sparks off these episodes in her in the first place – an illness which, as severe mental illness often does, separates and alienates her from others. In its plot centred on psychological fugue, it’s a sort of ancestor of Lost Highway; in its emphasis on melancholic investigation in picturesque surroundings, it reminds me a lot of Don’t Look Now, but whilst in that the final twist hinges on a case of mistaken identity on the protagonist’s part, here it reveals hitherto-unacknowledged aspects of the lead character’s identity. In establishing that the answers are to be found within instead of in the exterior world, Footprints manages to be both a compelling giallo and a fascinating anti-giallo.
Back in the 19th Century, Lilith Silver (Eileen Daly) attempted to intervene in a duel between her lover and Sir Sethane Blake (Christopher Adamson), only to arrive too late, her beloved shot dead by Blake. Seizing a gun, she shot Blake, only to be shot in turn by his second. You would think that would be the end of her troubles – but Blake turns out to be a vampire, and for reasons which are never adequately explained decides to make her one. Now it’s the 1990s, and Lilith is still alive. The main problem she faces in boredom, which she alleviates by hanging out in the sort of goth clubs which only have the most obvious Bauhaus and Fields of the Nephilim songs on their soundtracks and working as a sexy assassin. The latter feels like it would offer more novelty than the former, but on the plus side, both jobs mean she can wear latex and corsets 24/7.
However, other forces are swirling in the margins. After running into some unexpected opposition at her latest job, Lilith decides to look into the secrets of the target, and becomes aware that he was one of the Illuminati. Two police detectives – the grounded Detective Inspector Price (Jonathan Coote) and the obsessive true believer who refers to himself as the Horror Movie Man (David Warbeck) are on her tail. And it transpires that heading up the Illuminati is none other than Blake…
Jake West’s Razor Blade Smile comes across like a Garth Marenghi interpretation of Underworld, except it hails from 1998 and so anticipated it by some years. In fact, given that Underworld‘s lead team of Len Wiseman, Kate Beckinsale, and Michael Sheen were all British film industry sorts and therefore might have encountered this via the burst of utterly unmerited hype which greeted it, it’s wholly possible that Underworld turned into an exercise in sneaking as much Razor Blade Smile-esque nonsense under the radar as possible without the studio noticing.
As an independent production, however, Razor Blade Smile had no upper limit on how goofy it could get – there was nobody to step in to tell Jake West “no” when he went too far, and he rarely passes up an opportunity to do exactly that. The gunplay is just as prominent but more amateurish; the incongruous use of fetishwear on assassination missions is still a thing, but there’s absolutely no subtlety about it this time. (It does, at least, have the guts to imply that Lilith dresses like that because she gets off on it, which I suppose is more honest than Kate Beckinsale’s outfit being treated as some sort of serious business official uniform.) The movie culminates with a confrontation between the main character and the vampire that turned her in the first place. They even have extensive use of narration from the main character, and I swear Kate Beckinsale mimics the delivery from this when she does the voiceovers in Underworld.
At the same time, this goes way more cartoonish than Underworld had the guts to. There’s more quips, sillier lore, and the whole thing is several steps more lowbrow, more horny, and more amateurishly executed than Underworld (or, for that matter, Blade or Vampire: the Masquerade, both of which are likely influences). Lilith keeps her gun rack in a coffin, for crying out loud.
This was Jake West’s feature-length debut, and… well, how shall I put this? His subsequent output has included a few more narrative movies here and there, but he’s largely specialised in documentaries about movies – he’s done one on Phantasm, a string on the video nasties, and more besides – and it’s perhaps telling that he’s made a career largely off the back of material where he doesn’t have to write a story, direct actors, or oversee special effects work. The two things this doesn’t have more of than Underworld is werewolves (surprisingly absent, in fact!) and quality control.
It’s not that West’s outright incompetent – he makes the material he’s got look as good as he can. But he’s clearly not working with top-grade action movie actors or stunt people, and some of the visual ideas onscreen are flashily executed but absurd in their underlying conception. There’s a surreal dream sequence with special effects you’d think would be well beyond the budget of this nonsense, for instance, and an Internet segment which is risible even for 1998 – not a cyberpunk VR sequence, just regular web browsing and video chat – and I’m not sure which of those is more trippy. There’s absolutely no middle gear when it comes to the use of blood either – there’s either absurd amounts or a tiny trickle, and that’s it. The script (also by West, who handled the editing too as well as directing) is pretty risible too, throwing in dialogue like “Pain rides tight on pleasure’s back” and being very obviously built on cool scenes West wanted to shoot without putting much priority on the whole thing making sense.
Bizarrely enough, this was made by Manga Films and distributed by Manga Entertainment, who Brits of a certain age will remember as the folk who – as the title implies – built their business on importing some of the more violent and horny anime releases on home video in the UK back in the 1990s. I guess this was a bid at throwing together a British-made live action movie catering to the same audience; if that’s the case, they largely proved that the indie-tier British movie industry didn’t have the chops to pull this concept off in anything but the most hilarious so-bad-it’s-good fashion. Though some moments are clearly played for laughs, there aren’t enough of these to really sell the idea that it’s a parody, especially since the thing it works best as a parody of – Underworld – hadn’t been made yet.
Whilst Big Finish’s monthly range of Doctor Who audio dramas had previously shuffled about from Doctor to Doctor for the first year and a bit that they had the licence, they began 2001 with four releases all from the same Doctor. This is because something very special happened: Paul McGann agreed to come back to the role of the Eighth Doctor, having had a blink-and-you’ll-miss it televised tenure in the TV movie, and Big Finish realised that by issuing a clutch of four four-part audio dramas one after another, they could give him the full season in audio he had been denied in television.
(It’s not too late! RTD, please, do the wise thing and give McGann a season! You could do it as a spin-off show – call it the Eighth Doctor Adventures or something. Your broadcast partners at Disney+ are hungry for spin-offs, after all. You’ll need to do it before he’s aged out of the role – Night of the Doctor having set a pretty firm end point – so get on with it already!)
This was perhaps Big Finish’s biggest challenge to date. With their Bernice Summerfield line, they began with audio adaptations of some of the Doctor-less New Adventures novels (from after Virgin lost the rights and retooled things so Benny was the protagonist), giving them a clear model to work with. With Doctor Who, the television show obviously gave them ample precedent to work from; the biggest departure so far had been with the Sixth Doctor audio drams, but even then so the main difference thus far was that they gave him good stories.
With Paul McGann’s depiction of the Eighth Doctor, however, there was much more of a blank slate to work with. Sure, the TV movie happened, but nobody wanted a repeat of that – the fans wouldn’t want more of that, Big Finish’s authors didn’t want to write more of it, and Paul wanted to push past it as firmly as possible. There had, of course, by this point been years worth of Eighth Doctor Adventures novels from BBC Books, and Eighth Doctor comics in Doctor Who Magazine – but the thing about novels and comics is that they don’t require actors.
Big Finish decided – or, perhaps, were obliged to under the terms of their licence – to make their own continuity for the Eighth Doctor audio adventures, giving themselves permission to make the odd nod to the other strands of tie-in media if they wished but not regarding themselves as bound by it. This gave McGann the freedom to likewise ignore all the other tie-in media and perform the Eighth Doctor and interpret the script the way he wanted to. He’s still doing audios with Big Finish to this day, fitting them in around a fairly healthy schedule of movie, television, and stage projects, so he clearly still thinks it’s worth it – so let’s enjoy Paul McGann’s first full season of Doctor Who from a time when, despite oddball experiments like Death Comes To Time and Scream of the Shalka, he was still the incumbent Doctor.
Storm Warning
The Doctor is, as we saw him at the end of the TV movie, doing some reading in the TARDIS library – enjoying former companion/future acquaintance Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, specifically. Suddenly, the TARDIS systems alert him to a nearby kerfuffle in the time vortex: another time ship has crashed and is stuck in a time loop, with extradimensional vortisaurs flitting about it for good measure. His attempt to intervene sees the TARDIS assailed by the beasties, forcing an emergency landing. Meanwhile in 1930, the new British Imperial Airship Scheme’s flagship, the R101, is taking off for Karachi. Among the passengers is Charlotte “Charley” Pollard (India Fisher), who’s pretending to be a boy in order to infiltrate the crew.
Charley fancies herself something of an adventuress, though this is admittedly her first adventure; caught out in her deception, she’s now a fugitive stowaway – just the sort of friend the Doctor likes to make. When the Doctor helps Charley evade pursuit, she’s quite taken with him, not least because of all the historical figures he namedrops; the Doctor, perhaps, sees something of himself in her, what with them both being runaways with romantic souls and a big dose of wanderlust. Perhaps this is the start of a wonderful friendship – or maybe more than that…
But there’s more at stake here than just the Doctor and Charley’s personal liberty and possible sparks of romance. Something sinister is going on aboard the ship, involving an unregistered guest being kept under unusual circumstances – and the vortisaurs have followed the TARDIS out of the time vortex and are harassing the R101. And once the Doctor finds out which ship he’s on, on what date, he’s even more perturbed – for the Doctor remembers that this is the R101’s final flight, which history records ended in disaster and the loss of dozens of lives, though later overshadowed by the Hindenburg. (Less people died on that, but there were cameras onsite capturing the disaster.) It would be an act of cosmological violence to save the ship, but can the Doctor resist the urge to break the laws of time just a little by saving Charley? Perhaps – especially since he has a strong sense that her presence here is already violating the fabric of time…
Released between 1970 and 1976, the Lone Wolf and Cub manga by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima has unleashed a range of spin-offs, and perhaps the most famous is the series of six movies put out by Toho. Four of the six were released in 1972 alone, with an annual release in 1973 and 1974 before the sequence petered out; the series was initially produced by Shintaro Katsu, star of the long-running Zatoichi series which habitually put out several instalments in a year, and on his part it seems to have been his bid to craft a similar regular gig for his elder brother, Tomisaburo Wakayama, who took on the lead role of Itto, the Lone Wolf.
Whereas the Zatoichi sequence ran for over a decade, Lone Wolf and Cub was over within a few years – then again, in the same general timespan Zatoichi also petered to a halt, so perhaps the market was shifting. Either way, it’s the Lone Wolf and Cub movies which have gained more recognition with Western audiences, for reasons I’ll get into towards the end of this article; the Criterion Collection has put out a compilation of Lone Wolf and Cub, in particular. For this review, I’m going to review all seven movies in the six-part series – no, that’s not a typo, you’ll understand by the end…
Oh, and rape is a frequent feature of these stories, so content warning for discussion of that below here.
Sword of Vengeance
We open with Itto Ogami (Tomisaburo Wakayama) attending to some business with the lord of a noble house, who has been denounced as a traitor. The lord is, alas, a small child – but such are the draconian measures the Tokugawa Shogunate are turning to, along with a network of ninja spies and assassins. Officially, Ogami’s role in the state apparatus is to act as the second of nobles who are performing seppuku, to ensure they can do it properly or to perform the act himself if they cannot (as is the case with this small child). In practice, everyone knows and admits that he is the Shogun’s executioner.
There are those, however, who have decided his usefulness is at an end – shadowy forces gathering power to themselves within the bureaucracy who realise that Ogami is unlikely to be recruitable for their schemes, but is eminently replaceable – simply engineer an incident at his home to prompt an investigation, plant incriminating evidence to conprehensively discredit him, and you open up his position to be co-opted. So it is that ninjas infiltrate his household and kill Ogami’s wife Azami (Keiko Fujita), family, and servants, and soon after Inspector General Bizen Yagyu (Fumio Watanabe) – a senior agent of the conspiracy – shows up to frame Ogami as a traitor intending to assassinate the Shogun.
By the end of the gambit, the Ogami clan is near extinct; only Itto himself and his tiny son Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa) have survived, Itto having slain the Inspector. Now the former executioner journeys through the land as a dishevelled ronin, toting Daigoro in a baby cart…
One thing which is notable about the “video nasty” moral panic of the 1980s is the way it was somewhat classist in what it chose to target. Arthouse movies by and large got by scot free, but lowbrow B-movies got hammered, and sure, extreme content tends to be the purview of B-movies, but then again Last House On the Left was directly inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring but only one of those got on the infamous Department of Public Prosecutions list.
What with the moral panic coinciding with the heyday of the slasher movie, a swathe of slasher and slasher-adjacent films ended up either on the DPP list or otherwise associated with the “video nasty” concept due to gaining ostentatious levels of BBFC approval. Here’s three of them which somehow ended up on my to-watch pile at some point.
Mother’s Day
We open our story at a meeting of EGO – a cultish self-help group run by the buzzword-spouting Ernie (Bobby Collins) – the name stands for Ernie’s Growth Opportunity. Two youths who dress like an extremely square person’s idea of what the Manson Family looked like end up getting a lift from a sweet old lady (Beatrice Pons). The hippies obviously planning on killing and robbing her – but before they can enact her plan, she leads them into the clutches of her ultraviolent sons, Ike (Gary Pollard) and Addley (Michael McCleery), who decapitate the dude, beat down the young lady, then watch as their mother garottes the girl whilst they snigger in the background like Beavis and Butthead.
We jump to 1980. The Rat Pack, a trio of former college dormmates, have retained their friendships even though they all graduated and went their separate ways 10 years ago and have lived very different lives since. Trina (Tiana Pierce) has become a dyed in the wool yuppie, throwing bawdy booze and cocaine-fuelled pool parties, Jackie (Deborah Luce) has become an untidy New York slacker haunting the periphery of the art world, whilst Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson) has made lots of personal sacrifices in order to care for her sick mother.
Each year, the Rat Pack take it in turns to arrange “mystery weekends” for the gang to all enjoy together. Jackie, it turns out, has arranged the reunion this year – a camping trip in the New Jersey Pine Barrens (or the “Deep Barons”, as a local roadsign has it). Unfortunately, that’s where that creepy murder family from the pre-credits sequence live! When the Rat Pack are kidnapped by the family, the women are going to need to pull out all of their ingenuity to survive… but who or what is Queenie, the one individual that Mother seems to he scared of?
The story so far: after kicking off with the Timewyrm saga in 1991, the Virgin New Adventures novel line spent early 1992 with the Cat’s Cradle trilogy, in which the TARDIS was damaged due to a crash with an early Gallifreyan time machine. At the end of Witch Mark, the final Cat’s Cradle novel, the repairs were completed using demonic protoplasm – causing the TARDIS to become corrupted, with consequences for the Doctor due to his symbiotic relationship with it. By the end of the chunk of novels I’m going to cover here, that problem will be resolved. Will this new plot arc turn out to actually be prominently relevant over these six novels, developed according to a consistent and thought-out plan? Or will authors just pay lip service to it whilst writing the book they want to write anyway, like they did with the previous seven books? Place your bets now…
Nightshade by Mark Gatiss
With the TARDIS mended, you’d expect everything would be fine – but just as a speck of contamination has made its way into the fabric of the machine, a kernel of discontent is nagging at the Doctor’s psyche. In fact, he’s outright snappish and irritable, to the point where Ace is shaken by one of his moments of bad temper. The Doctor realises it’s high time he and Ace slow down and did some mental stocktaking, so he lands the TARDIS in December 1968, near the sleepy Yorkshire village of Crook Marsham; elsewhere the Sixties are getting really exciting, but here they’ve almost entirely passed the village by. As they take in the surroundings, the Doctor discloses to Ace that he’s feeling his age, and badly misses the people from his past (when he loses his temper at Ace it’s because she’s messing with some of Susan’s stuff), and he’s seriously contemplating retirement. (He will, of course, eventually get around to acting on that in The Giggle.)
Meanwhile, Edmund Trevithick is trying to make the best of his own retirement. With his wife having died and his daughter having dropped out of society, Edmund now resides in the local old folks’ home. From 1953 to 1958, Trevithick was known up and down the country as Professor Nightshade, star of the science fiction show Nightshade – a Quatermass-like affair in which the heroic Professor investigated strange enigmas and thwarted alien monstrosities. With a chap from the BBC coming up to interview him in conjunction with the repeats currently airing, Trevithick is quite enjoying being back in the limelight again. What he doesn’t enjoy is people breaking his window late at night – people who call him by the name of Nightshade…
Trevithick is not the only local to be haunted by the ghosts of the past right now – nor, for that matter, is the Doctor with his maudlin thoughts of Susan and the other companions he’s left behind. And with these ghost encounters turning fatal, it’s clear that there’s something here for the Doctor and Ace to look into. The only prior association the village has with ghosts hails from strange stories about the old tumbledown Norman castle that used to loom over the village – long since destroyed in the Civil War, in a story which has its own peculiarities. Yet the site of the castle has now become home to a large radio telescope – and the research group there, led by Dr. Christine Cooper, has started receiving readings which they cannot make head or tail of. Clearly, the Doctor’s going to head down to the radio telescope (brushing aside his Post-Logopolis Stress Disorder) and get involved again – and perhaps this time he’ll be able to count on Professor Nightshade’s help!
When it comes to the original Big Finish roster of Doctors, the Sixth Doctor was in most need of rehabilitation via Big Finish audio drama (what with his televised tenure being severely compromised) and the Seventh Doctor had the least to prove (due to having a really very good run on television). By process of elimination, this meant that the Fifth Doctor was hovering somewhere between the two – though perhaps a touch closer to the Sixth Doctor end of the scale than the Seventh, since Davison has gone on the record as saying that he’d have stuck it out in the televised role for longer if he’d had more material on the calibre of his last story. But when that last story is The Caves of Androzani – widely acknowledged as being one of the best serials the classic show ever aired – that’s setting a very high bar indeed.
That said, when the back end of his run saw ample signs of the blight which would smother Colin Baker’s tenure as the Doctor right out of the gate, perhaps solidly entertaining audio dramas which steer clear of the pitfalls of the worst Fifth Doctor tales is a reasonable enough target to aim for? Certainly, that’s the standard which was hit by Phantasmagoria – the first Big Finish audio drama that Davison had to himself without McCoy and Baker butting in. Let’s see whether his crop of Big Finish stories from 2000 improved on that.
The Land of the Dead
It’s just Nyssa with the Doctor here, situating this in between Time-Flight and Arc of Infinity during that unexplored bit where they were implied to have had a bunch of adventures together after they dumped Tegan at Heathrow. Nyssa and the Doctor have arrived in Alaska, where the TARDIS seems to have caught wind of an anomalous power source. After a brief blip into 1964, the TARDIS settles in 1994 – where oil baron Shaun Brett (Christopher Scott) is building himself an expansive house, making extensive use of local materials (including animal pelts and the like) in a way which local indigenous folk find deeply obnoxious and disrespectful. The locals may have a point: strange forces have been roused – forces for whom masses of fossilised bone, such as Brett has been collecting, make ideal vessels…
This is an audio drama I couldn’t get into, and a chunk of that is because I just wasn’t able to overlook the elephant in the room. Some of the characters – Gaborik and Tulung – are meant to hail from the Koyukon First Nations people, but their voice actors (Andrew Fettes and Neil Roberts) very much don’t hail from that background. Indeed, one of them seems to be deliberately adopting a stilted speech pattern to indicate “I am playing someone of a particular ethnicity”, and whilst accents are certainly a thing it’s awkward when this sort of mimicry happens. White actors voicing a Black characters and putting on deliberate “Black” accents to play that role is something I think most of us would be uncomfortable with, after all – and I feel like the same principle applies here.
The consensus in Doctor Who fandom seems to be that whilst the Sixth Doctor’s run on television was kind of rough, Colin Baker was really able to turn the character around in the Big Finish audio dramas, where at long last he was given solid material to work with and wasn’t caught up in a power struggle between a script editor and a producer with opposed views on the show’s direction. If we set aside the multi-Doctor oddity The Sirens of Time, Colin Baker’s first Big Finish audio was Whispers of Terror. This paired him with a returning Nicola Bryant in a story which managed to be, if not stellar, at least more consistently enjoyable than much of the material they’d starred in together. Over year 2000, Baker would go on to star in four different Big Finish audios – none of which featured Peri, or for that matter Mel – for Baker would be the first Doctor to perform the role for Big Finish opposite companions he’d never travelled with during the TV show.
In the case of the Sixth Doctor, there’s a compelling creative opportunity set up for this. The timey-wimey nature of The Trial of a Time Lord means that it sets a firm end point for his journeys with Peri, who’d been his companion since prior to his regeneration, but whilst he leaves the courtroom with Mel at the end of the saga, this sets up a bit of a paradox – because Mel comes to the courtroom from some point in her personal timeline after Terror of the Vervoids, which was picked out by the Doctor as a case from his future, involving a companion he hadn’t actually met yet.
The smoothest way to resolve the paradox is to assume that the Sixth Doctor and Mel don’t go directly from The Ultimate Foe to Time and the Rani without any stopovers in between; instead, the Doctor dropped Mel off wherever she’d been plucked away from to attend the courtroom (where she was most likely then picked up by a future version of the Sixth Doctor), and then went off on his own way, eventually encountering Mel for the first time and experiencing Terror of the Vervoids for real instead of as courtroom footage.
This means that, just like the Second Doctor is theorised to have enjoyed an entire “Season 6B” following The War Games in which he undertook tasks for the Celestial Intervention Agency before his forced regeneration was imposed upon him, so too can we imagine any number of “Season 23Bs” enjoyed by the Sixth Doctor; in fact, Season 23B is even better-supported by the TV show itself than Season 6B, because the mere existence of Terror of the Vervoids implies its existence directly, no reasoning outside of the television show needed. We can go further than that, though: sure, sooner or later the Sixth Doctor must meet Mel for the “first” time, but who says he can’t go the long way around to get there? It’s possible to infer all sorts of new friends for him to meet in between – and in doing so, this creates a creative space to explore how the character might have further developed into the softer direction which Trial gave us glimpses of.
Of course, to get the best out of that, you’d need the right companion, and as it happens Big Finish managed to strike gold the first time around…
The Marian Conspiracy
Dr. Evelyn Smythe (Maggie Stables), a middle-aged history professor, is giving a lecture on Elizabeth I’s rise to power and the difficulties she faced during the reign of Queen Mary. Unfortunately, a big-haired buffoon in a clownish coat has shown up with a machine that makes annoying bleeping noises; this proves so disruptive that Evelyn has to cut the lecture short. When she confronts the weirdo in question, he witters about how she’s somehow connected to a temporal nexus point which threatens the integrity of the timeline, and on top of all that insists that John Whiteside Smith – privy councillor to Elizabeth I and ancestor of Evelyn – never existed. To make things even more ridiculous, the stranger makes this claim on the preposterous grounds that he himself frequented Elizabeth’s court, and would have met Whiteside had he existed!
When the weirdo shows up at her home, Evelyn decides to let him see her family records for himself, just to shut him up. Not only is Whiteside missing, but Evelyn’s entire family tree starts to fade away before her very eyes! The stranger explains that some manner of time paradox has ended up affecting her history, and that if it is not resolved she too will pop out of existence. Well, Evelyn has felt a bit under the weather recently, and the disappearance of information from her notes is outright bizarre – perhaps there’s something to the stranger’s claims after all. After all, he is a Doctor…
Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy 